


Five of John's Worst Roommates, and the Best One.

by Nwar



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Domestic, Domesticity, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Fluff, John before Sherlock, M/M, Roommates, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 05:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20040523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nwar/pseuds/Nwar
Summary: John's had five truly awful roommate experiences, and one very good one. Who would have guessed that John's least objectionable living partner would be Sherlock Holmes? (5+1)





	Five of John's Worst Roommates, and the Best One.

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, the timeline here is slightly off-canon, but closer to ACD. John and Sherlock meet in their late twenties rather than the mid/late thirties of the show.  
Secondly, all of these are based off of real life roommate experiences that I, the author, have had. Everybody have a quick prayer for me, thanks.

The people that know Sherlock, and by extension know his friendlier counterpart, John, know that Sherlock must be hell to live alongside. Mrs.Hudson sees the human skin samples carefully pinned to the cutting board, and prays for John to find a solution to Sherlock’s experiments. Molly hands off a foot, and wonders if John ever questions his sanity. Lestrade chases after Sherlock as he jumps into a skip, and asks himself what that must smell like on the ride home.  
It’s the same question that every single one of his girlfriends asked, when he still had girlfriends; “How do you put up living with Sherlock Holmes?”  
John usually comes up with an excuse, but the truth is that he just has a lot of practice-- and that Sherlock isn’t the worst roommate he’s ever had.  
His first roommate (after his parents, of course), is Harry. He’d just moved out to go to university and study medicine, and Harry invites him to live in her apartment and split the rent.  
John agrees, bless his naive little heart.  
John moves in on a Tuesday. That evening, around nine, Harry is putting on makeup. John is rubbing his eyes which have gone bleary after staring at the textbook for so long and understanding so little. “What are you doing that for?”  
Harry looks at him like he’s crazy. “I’m going out.”  
“On a Tuesday?”  
“Yeah, my first class isn’t until ten on Wednesdays, and the drinks are cheaper on weekdays.” Harry says this, taking a quick break from her eyeliner to take another slug from the bottle of Svedka on her makeup/studying (though rarely used for that purpose) desk.  
It turns out the drinks are cheaper on weekdays, and so Harry goes out on weekdays, and of course everyone’s going out on the weekends, so Harry goes out on the weekends. And what’s wrong with a few margaritas after class on Monday? Who can blame her for a few shots on Sunday morning in advance of the fraternity day party?  
John hates it. He hates seeing her wreck herself like this. He hates hearing the idle complaints she makes talking to herself, that she’s failed this class again, that she can’t feel her fingertips anymore, that she needs to go to an eye doctor sometime.  
It gets worse after that-- Harry goes from functional alcoholic to nonfunctional student. She falls asleep on the couch, and pees in her sleep. When John finds her asleep on the hallway floor, her hiccuping breath scares the life out of him. She loses her keys to the apartment, and doesn’t want the landlord to make her pay for a replacement, so she insists they leave the door unlocked 24/7.  
“Harry, c’mon, that’s not safe,” John begs.  
“Lock your bedroom door if you’re so worried, you’re just like mom,” Harry replies, adding some bourbon to her coffee.  
John does lock his bedroom door, but he lies awake at night with dread in his stomach anyway that Harry’s going to get too drunk and not come home, or be taken in her sleep, or that everything they own is going to be stolen out from under them.  
He moves to campus the next year, and gets a dorm with a man named James.  
At first, John really likes James. James is quiet, studious, and neat. He thinks James could be a very good roommate, indeed.  
That quickly goes to shit. James, for the most part, is a good roommate. His girlfriend, however, is not. And that’s precisely what James’s girlfriend is to John; another roommate. She stays over every night, and hangs out during the day. She has a dorm but doesn’t use it, instead spending all of her time with James.  
John starts getting grumpy about this, but is not sure how to express it without offending his new roommate. He starts spending more time out of the dorm, going to the gym more, spending more time on sports and extracurriculars. He still has to hear the giggling and canoodling at night, but things, overall, could be worse.  
Until James decides that John is a jock.  
“John, have you got a girlfriend yet?” James asks one day, the girlfriend giggling into his neck.  
“Uh, no,” John says, looking up from his homework.  
“Can’t be that hard to snag a cheerleader or model or something for you,” James says, bursting with giggles.  
John looks at him in confusion. “Pardon?”  
“Oop, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend,” James says mockingly. “Are you going to push me into a locker?”  
The insults, at exactly this level of unoriginal and banal, continue for the rest of the school term. John can’t do anything in the dorm without being mocked or laughed at in some way. He can’t even use the bathroom without some kind of comment from James. His girlfriend still sleeps in the same twin bed, and John sleeps in his own twin bed on the other side of the room, and he pretends he can’t hear them having sex through his headphones.  
John switches dorms the next year.  
When he moves in, he tells Raul, the new roommate, that he has only two rules: lock the door, and no girls sleeping over.  
Raul laughs, “Baby, that won’t be a problem. I’m as gay as the day is long.”  
John supposes that’s fine. He’s always been pretty confident in his sexuality, and living with a gay man shouldn’t phase him.  
Then he walks into the dorm for the first time to bring in his things, and realizes Raul has already moved in. In fact, he’s decorated.  
“Oh, yeah,” Raul says, gesturing to the life-sized painting hanging on the wall. “I painted that. It’s actual cut velvet, that’s what gives it the depth.”  
John can see the depth. In fact, with his height, the full frontal naked man’s depth is exactly at his eye level. He gulps.  
Raul looks over at him, as if daring him to say anything. John shakes his head, “That’s impressive.”  
He can ignore a giant velvet painting of a very well endowed man if it means he doesn’t have to hear James’s jibes and Harry’s hiccuping.  
But then he comes home during the first week of classes and Raul is watching a TV show on his computer. With the computer at full volume. And Raul is laughing at it. At full volume.  
John grits his teeth.  
John uses his headphones to study again, which is fine, until it’s time for bed, and Raul is still watching his show on his computer.  
“Hey, sorry, but uh, is there any chance you could use headphones?”  
Raul falls over himself to apologize and grabs headphones. He continues his show, headphones in, still laughing at full volume, until three in the morning.  
Raul has calls with his parents, who he loves dearly. John is sure he loves them dearly, if they would do anything but scream at him. Raul, of course, uses speakerphone. Raul also yells back to defend himself, and John wonders how an entire family can be completely unaware that you can communicate over the phone with normal voice levels.  
At this point, John is in his third year of college, and thus has the classes routine all wrapped up. He goes to most of his classes, but doesn’t beat himself up for missing a day or taking one off for mental health. He does his work, keeps his head down, and powers through. He knows that he doesn’t want to be up at seven AM, and therefore only chooses classes that suit his schedule. Raul, however, is a first year. Raul chose an 8AM Monday class for a subject he cannot fail. John knows this not from talking to Raul, but from hearing Raul’s mother call him at 7AM every day to wake him up, and listening to Raul lie and say he’s on his way to class before going back to sleep.  
He knows to mind his own business, and doesn’t do anything in particular to try to change Raul’s ways, but when he asks for advice, John simply tells him to go to class and do his work. It really is that simple.  
John tries again to simply stay out of the room, to avoid his roommate, to do anything except talk to his roommate because he knows if he heard even one more word out of Raul’s exceedingly loud mouth, he’d punch it.  
Of course, it’s only a few weeks from the end of term when John comes home to find Raul sobbing on the floor of their room. John sighs. At this point, he’s lost all sympathy for Raul, but he’s still a good man, and he can’t just ignore someone that’s clearly at their breaking point.  
“Hey man, what’s going on?” John says, gently setting a hand on Raul’s shoulder.  
“Do you ever feel like such a complete fucking failure, and your parents are totally disappointed in you because you can’t even pass one stupid fucking class?” Raul sobbed.  
John wanted to say, “Well, no.” but he resisted because he’s a good person like that.  
John is finally in his last year of undergraduate. He is ready to use the money he’s saved from working and scrimping to finally get a tiny one bedroom apartment. No more roommates for John Watson, no sir.  
John’s father gets cancer.  
Of course John sends every penny he has to pay his parents’ bills, how could he not? Dad can’t work anymore, mom is staying home taking care of him, god knows Harry isn’t contributing anything-- it’s on John to keep things afloat. John is back to the university subsidized, shared bedroom dorms for another year.  
His next roommate was Alison.  
John was slightly nervous about living with a woman that wasn’t his sister. He’d heard horror stories of roommates who had a brief fling, broke up, and were forced to live miserably with each other for the rest of the year. But co-ed dorms were the new wave, and John was being forced to ride it.  
Alison was, for all intents and purposes, fairly normal. She didn’t drink heavily. She didn’t bring home a lover every night. She didn’t scream and sob and make a ton of noise. In all ways but one, she was a perfect roommate.  
The one way she wasn’t, however, was a big one.  
Alison did not clean. At first, John wasn’t too bothered by this. Alison kept her mess to her side of the room, John kept his side neat, all’s well that ends well. For the first few weeks, it was simply having a bit of mess on the other side of the room.  
However, he soon realized that mess was not just a visual assault but also an olfactory one. Alison didn’t clean her bedding, or clothing, or take out her trash. That meant that after the first month, the intense smell of sweat, body odor, and rotting food started piling up. At the end of a long day of classes, John came home to a wall of smell hitting him.  
John didn’t breathe to deeply, bought a lot of air freshener, and buckled the fuck down. He was not moving again, so help him god.  
After the second month, when the stench reached down the hallway, the building manager forced Alison to clean her side of the room. After that, John could see the trash can underneath one of the piles, and started taking her trash out for her. He even took the bedding off her bunk once and washed it as quickly as he could so he could return it before she came back from class. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything.  
John stuck it out through the whole year, and only took a real, deep breath once she’d moved out, his father’s cancer was in remission, and he had a job as a hospital janitor that paid pretty well.  
Then, of course, came his service.  
John considered himself somewhat of a ladies man-- in the flirting sense, yes, but also in the living sense. He didn’t want to be in a bachelor pad or animal house-- he didn’t feel comfortable living with the very intensely masculine habit of beer bottles on display or jerry-rigged toilet paper holders. He wanted a nice, normal level of messiness and the dishes to be done at least every other day.  
“You’ll be in bunker 59,” the sergeant said absently, and then looked up at John in surprise. “Oh ho, 59. You’re going to have fun.”  
John rather suspected that no, he wouldn’t.  
Bunker 59 was, according to the rest of their division, the fun bunker. There was a blow-up doll stapled to the back of the door. Sheets were hung from top bunks to make little nooks out of bottom bunks. Empty liquor bottles were lined along the window like little troops in the war against abstaining. Not one single bunk along the row of twelve had their boots lined up neatly or corners precisely tucked.  
John walked to the end of the room where there was one open top bunk, which, unfortunately, had no mattress.  
The man in the bottom bunk looked up from his magazine. “Oh, are you moving in up there?”  
John smiled tightly. “Yup, yeah. John Watson, surgeon.”  
The guy whistled. “A surgeon? On the front lines? How badly do you have to fuck up an appendectomy to be sent to die?”  
John gritted his teeth. “Haha, yeah. Do you know where my mattress is?”  
The guy looked up from his magazine, and then glanced down, where John now observed that his bunk was slightly higher than the others. He’d taken the mattress from up top and put it under his own.  
“Sorry kid, you take what comfort you can get around here,” the man said, helpfully moving off the bunk so that John could pull off the thin plastic mattress himself. “I’m Archer, by the way.”  
“Nice to meet you, Archer,” John said. And really, looking back, Archer was not a terrible bunkmate. He was pretty quiet, didn’t ask for much, and didn’t really speak to John unless spoken to, and that was just fine by John.  
It was the other members of the bunker that were the problem.  
They threw parties every night, snuck in women from the nearby town, played loud music til the early hours, seemingly unaware or unaffected by the six AM bugle.  
“How do we pass inspection?” John wondered, tucking in his corners and lining up his boots on Sunday morning like he had at boot camp.  
Archer pulled a bottle of expensive liquor out from under the bed and tapped it with his nail. “They tend to let us go with a warning.”  
And so, for the next two years, John lived in the army equivalent of a raging frat house. He learned to sleep through the screaming moans of the local girls, the pounding music of the popular radio stations, and the bombs that dropped nearby. He learned to use a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned in months, maybe years, and learned to mind his own business when it came to trysts between other members of the bunker.  
It’s funny, John thought later, I’m bleeding out on the sand, surely about to die. But gosh, I won’t have to go back to bunker 59, will I? Everything’s coming up Watson.  
John didn’t die, but also didn’t have to go back to bunker 59. He did have to go to a hospital, and grit his teeth through physical therapy, hydrotherapy, and regular therapy.  
Then he was in London, and for the first time ever, he didn’t have any roommates. Despite everything, every bit of pain and suffering he’d gone through, he was slightly grateful that he could come home to a place that was just his own. For a few days, that was.  
After the fourth night of waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat in an empty room, John realized that he was bored. He was insanely bored; there was nobody to worry over on the couch, nobody to be angry with in the kitchen, nobody to clean up after or ignore. He was really, truly alone in his home for the first time and he hated it.  
Luckily, the next day, he ran into an old friend.  
John’s sixth and final roommate was mercurial. He said, upon introduction, that he played the violin at all hours and sometimes didn’t talk for days on end. Fine, good, John could deal with that. Sherlock neglected to mention the feet in the freezer, the chemistry lab on the kitchen table, and that he’d need to do literally every single chore if he wanted to eat or have laundry.  
John also didn’t know that Sherlock would press his freezing cold feet against his thighs, or that he would fall asleep before changing the (voraciously) soiled sheets, or that he would simply not brush his teeth if they’d run out of toothpaste.  
But on the whole, John finds Sherlock to be a rather good roommate. Everything has a place, and if it looks messy to others, that’s their business. He did get out of the house, even if it is to chase criminals. The smell would usually clear out once Sherlock found a different noxious gas to replace the first. The fingers in the fridge were gone once Sherlock had used them to test corrosive acid, and were soon replaced by eyeballs. Oddly enough, the dishes were usually done, and not always by John.  
So when people asked, “How do you live with Sherlock Holmes?”  
John usually smiled and said serenely, “Very happily, thank you.”


End file.
